


Blank Slate

by AshToSilver



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Amnesia, M/M, Pre-Slash, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 17:56:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7184231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshToSilver/pseuds/AshToSilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He talks and talks and talks and still they don’t believe him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blank Slate

**Author's Note:**

> **idontsleepmakeme requested:** _Amnesiac!joker.Jack wakes up in a small,dark room last thing he recall was the fall that he knew'd be fatal.Drs call him Joker and they dont believe anything he said.Good thing batman comes to visit him.but why is Bruce Wayne suddenly takin him home?_
> 
> THESE PROMPTS WERE SUPPOSE TO BE ONLY 500 WORDS LONG.
> 
> Still a part of my [June Prompt Challenge](http://alexfics.tumblr.com/post/145111053242/accepting-batjokes-prompts). Let me know if you have a request!

He wakes.

Everything hurts and his head throbs. The room is dark, a bit cold and the less said about the mattress, the better.

He doesn’t know where he is.

Standing up is a bad idea, and he realizes that by the time he’s finished. The world sways and heaves around him and he presses a hand to the wall.

His skin is paperwhite and laced with scars.

“What,” he asks, with a throat like sandpaper and a mouth just as dry. “What,” he coughs, almost falls over. “What,” he gasps, and his vision begins to fade as the pain increases.

The last thing he realizes before he’s unconscious is that one wall of the room is entirely glass.

* * *

He’s awake. The lights are too bright and everything inside his head is hazy and blurred. He tries to reach, remember, recall, but it all slips away like water from his hand.

The door is locked. His bed is bolted to the floor. The bathroom is, well. He doesn’t need to leave, he supposes. He cannot leave, in fact, and he’s _tried_ , even though his bones ache and his muscles seize, some injury just out of sight making even breathing a chore.

He thinks maybe there are people, in the rooms - cells? - beside and around from him. The three cells directly across the hall from him has been sealed and everything is coated in a thick layer of dust. It means that he can’t see any occupied cells at all, and he suspects there also isn’t anyone in the cells directly on either side of him.

But he can hear voices, hear others. Nobody comes to check on him, at least not when he’s awake, but there are also cameras, a lot of cameras, so he suppose they are watching that way.

Sometimes he wakes up and there is food. Sometimes he wakes up and it’s gone. Sometimes he wakes up and he can barely keep breathing, his head hurts, his chest hurts, he blinks away tears and cannot understand why he’s being held here.

* * *

Eventually, they come for him.

“That was quite a fall, Joker,” they say.

_You were a coma for two months, you almost broke your spine, you have been incoherent for weeks, I hope you are willing to cooperate now._

“Why are you calling me that?” He asks, “why am I here? Why is my skin like this? What _happened to me_.”

“This is not the time for games, Joker,” they hiss. “This is not the time for one of your jokes.”

* * *

“Joker, take your pills,” they say.

“What? No,” he says, voice cracked and everything sore from his head to his feet.

They press a button and he ends up on the floor, electric shocks coursing through his limbs and a scream in his mouth.

“Cooperate, Joker,” says the orderly and he shakes his head.

“Get off me,” he demands, struggling against the hands on him. “Stop it, stop touching me, let me _go_.”

One hits him hard enough his vision almost blacks-out, before they wrestle him into a straightjacket.

* * *

“Can you just tell me why I’m here?” He asks, pleads of the doctor in a white coat. “What’d I _do_?”

“What _didn’t_ you do?” Is the disgusted response.

* * *

“I don’t remember,” he tries to explain, to anyone and everyone that will and won’t listen - the orderlies and the nurses and the doctors and the strange, strange patients that share the ward with him. “I have dreams, it’s dark and I’m standing at the edge and then I _fall_ and then-”

And then nothing. Nothing but a dark room and bruises on his skin and bones tender in their healing.

“I had-” he starts, _a family, a home, a wife, a child, a lover, a job, dreams, hopes, wishes, hobbies, a_ life. “I want-”

But nobody cares. They won’t even turn to look at him when he speaks.

* * *

One night he wakes up and there’s a literal demon in his cell.

He screams, because _what the fuck_.

“Joker,” hisses the creature, hellfire in its lungs. “How are you feeling?”

“ _The fuck are you_ ,” he yells, and throws his pillow at the invader, for lack of anything else to throw.

It bounces off, and the demon pauses. Then it reaches for its side and pulls something out. With a quiet click, there’s light as it turns on some weird-looking flashlight.

In the glow, the creature looks less like a demon out of hell and a lot more like a man… admittedly, one wearing what appears to be full body armour. And a mask. And a _cape_.

“This is how I die, isn’t it,” he says flatly. “I know I’m in a loony bin, but I thought security would at least stop the patients from getting into each other’s cells.”

“I am not a patient,” says the man, stepping forward and clipping the light onto it - his? - belt. “I am a vigilante.”

“That sounds like something an escaped mental patient would say,” he replies, lying back down. “If you’re not a patient, and you’re not a doctor, then you must be a dream. In which case; please fuck off.”

The man dressed like a demon does not.

“Do you know who I am?” The man doesn’t try to come any closer, which is nice, at least. “Can you tell me who you are?”

“I’ll tell you what I told everyone else,” he mutters, turning over to face the wall. “I don’t remember a damn thing, I woke up here, everything hurts and they all think I’m some- some sort of _psychopath_ and that I’m _faking it_ or some shit. I don’t know who they are, who you are, or who I am, so please, just leave me alone.”

Neither of them say anything for a while, until the man moves a little. “May I use a device I have with me to scan your head? It won’t touch you or make loud noises.”

He’s endured at least a week of everyone shoving him around and making him do things regardless of his own thoughts on the matter, so he’s oddly touched that the man asks at all. Which is probably the only reason he rolls onto his back and nods.

The man fiddles with some type of fancy looking gismo, before the man does indeed begin to wave it over his forehead and down the sides. The lights that flicker as it works make him blink a few times, but nothing otherwise happens.

The man plugs the gismo into what appears to be a highly-modified phone and stares at the screen for a long time. Then the man picks up from the small bedside table what looks an awful like the medical chart that’s suppose to be attached to the outside of his cell.

The man flicks though the chart once or twice, clearly looking for something that doesn’t appear to be there.

“They didn’t do an MRI, did they.” The man asks finally, with a resigned tone that suggests the man already knows the answer.

“Buddy, I don’t even think they’re treating me at all,” he says in answer.

* * *

The man - the creature, the demon, the _Batman_ , as he introduces himself, hassles what appears to be the entire night staff until they let him take their least favourite inmate-slash-patient to the medical centre.

The Batman does not seem so concerned that he’s going to escape, though everyone else is. As far as he can tell, the Batman is also the only one who _believes him_.

Also, he knows how to operate an MRI machine. This is a very strange evening.

“What should I call you?” The Batman asks, as he’s strapped down.

“I haven’t got a name,” he says. “But I don’t like being called Joker. It’s not me.”

An orderly mutters something about not being paid enough for this.

“I’ll call you Jay, if that’s alright,” the Batman says. “I’m afraid I don’t know your original name and I don’t know which one of your aliases you like best.”

“Fair enough,” says Jay, who isn’t sure how he feels about the considerate vigilante. “So don’t move or breathe or anything, right?”

“That’s the idea,” is the answer and Jay is slid into the machine. He hadn’t even thought about why the Batman had told him about his own scanner not touching him or making noises until he’s _in here_ . There’s a brace keeping his head in place and beeps _everywhere_ and he cannot move. He cannot even move his hands and he isn’t sure if it’s because he knows he shouldn’t or if it’s because he’s _freaking the fuck out_.

He tries really hard not to cry when they finally pull him out. He puts never doing that again on the top of his Do Not Want list, and honestly, even with a crappy memory like his, it’s still a pretty long list. He hasn’t had a good week. Weeks. Months. Whatever.

There’s a doctor now in staring at the screens while the Batman clicks away. She’s looking awfully pale and sort of guilty, which makes Jay feel better, especially when the Batman turns and says “you have suffered massive head trauma and it looks like your long-term memory has been damaged.”

On one hand, _yes he’s right thank you_ and on the other hand, “ah shit.”

The Batman looks a little like he agrees with him.

* * *

They make him redo the MRI. Then they make him do about thirty other tests.

Then they bring in some experts from one of the city’s hospitals.

_Do you know what the date is?_ They ask.

_Do you know the name of the hospital you’re in?_ They ask.

_Do you know who the president is?_ They ask.

_Do you know who you are?_

Some of the questions don’t mean anything to him. Others, he supposes, are a good idea, he can see why they’re asking him. Others don’t make sense at all.

He tries to be honest, tries to be _helpful_ , because it’s the first time anyone has listened to him. Some things don’t even register as meaning anything to him, others fill him with a sick feeling or cause his hands to tremble but he remembers nothing.

Sometimes, he remembers _something_. A feeling, a thought, a screenshot of a moment. He remembers the warm summer air of his falling dream. He remembers a newspaper article about Arkham. He remembers a doctor’s name. He remembers a speech given by the president - or rather, the president six terms ago. The doctor is now working in San Francisco. The article is almost twenty years out of date. The fall was months ago.

Some of the information is wrong - even when he spends ages thinking about it and describing everything he remembers, he still gets it wrong. Sometimes they ask for clarification he can’t give - they question everything and it doesn’t take long for him to doubt the fragile images he gets.

They ask and they ask and they _ask_ . Nothing but constant questions. Constant, endless questions. A lot of them are not very _nice_ questions. He gets tired of it quickly.

Then they make it worse.

They show him articles. _Joker Terrorizes Charity Ball. Joker Takes Hostages at Movie Theatre. Joker Convicted of $12 Million Dollar Robbery._

They show him videos. Fights between a purple-suited monster and a dark demon. Ransom tapes. Clips sent to news stations. Camera footage of a grinning maniac. Interviews, evidence recordings.

He throws up, mostly because he can’t think of another way to get them to stop showing him this. It’s beyond disturbing - the content, the words, the crimes - but the worst is seeing his face, his hands, his body doing those things.

He can see why everyone hates him now.

* * *

They give him a new team of doctors. They spend an awful lot of time trying to decide whether they should try to get his memories to come back or make sure they never do.

_He’s different now_ , they say. _He’s not the Joker anymore_.

_Or this is only temporary_ , they say. _It wouldn’t be the first time._

The other patients in his ward - strange as they are - seem to believe him the least. A lot of people don’t believe him anyway, and that’s honestly the worst part. He talks and talks and talks and still they don’t believe him.

He supposes with a track record like this body, he wouldn’t believe him either.

* * *

One day - maybe a month or two since he’s woken up - he’s out in the yard, a privilege he’s earned by behaving himself. It’s easy enough when you’re sane among madmen.

The other patients leave him alone, the only good side effect of his strange skin and strange hair. The sun is colder than he thought it would be - the summer is starting to turn to autumn now and he wonders what the city will look like in the winter. He can’t really remember Gotham, but the memories he has are edged with a strong love.

There’s the sound of footsteps and Jay tenses, prepared that someone might try to attack him again, or that the orderlies are here to drag him away early.

Instead a man he’s never seen before sits beside him, an easy smile on his face and _boy_ is it a gorgeous face.

“Hey,” the man says, offering a hand to shake like it’s _nothing_. “Jay, right? I’m Bruce.”

Jay bites down on the _hey sexy_ that wants to come out of his mouth, and shakes his hand politely instead, trying to keep the smile off his face. People don’t like it when he smiles or laughs these days.

“I heard about your story,” Bruce says, leaning back and stretching in a way that shows off every carefully tailored curve he’s got. “It’s terrible what’s happened, I hope you’re doing better after that fall?”

“Uh, yeah, it doesn’t hurt as much these days,” Jay says, wondering why _anyone_ considers his story terrible. From what he’s heard, the only way most people think it’s terrible is because he didn’t _die_.

Bruce nods, clearly pleased with this. “I’m on the Arkham Board of Directors - major donor status, and all that - and I’m wondering if we could chat a little about your treatment?”

“What about it?” Jay asks, visions of shock treatment and other delightful methods crawling through his mind.

Bruce smiles at that, a real, genuine smile. “How would you like to get out of here?”


End file.
